Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood Read online

  FOREWORD

  All gratitude to Wensley Clarkson for encouraging me to venture into my past in the first place and helping me understand that the journey may be daunting – but is well worth taking.

  Most sincere thanks to Tammy Cohen, for her friendship and valuable support and to my dear and lifelong friend Larraine De Napoli, who was generous with her time and patience in sharing her recollections of our teenage years.

  Thanks too to John Parrish in Sydney, who never fails to support and inspire from a great distance with wry humour and insight.

  I’d also like to pass on my thanks to everyone on the team at the Hackney Archive for their helpful advice and enthusiasm.

  Finally, three classic historical sources which have proved invaluable:

  • London 1945 by Maureen Waller;

  • Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 by David Kynaston;

  • Family Britain, 1951–1957 by David Kynaston.

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 The Vicar’s Baby

  2 A Telegram

  3 A Homecoming

  4 Bets Are On

  5 Neighbours

  6 Sundays

  7 A Liberty Bodice

  8 The Ascot’s Revenge

  9 A Diamond Ring

  10 A Rat’s Tale

  11 A Piano

  12 Farthings

  13 A Wedding

  14 School Milk

  15 Beside the Sea …

  16 The Good Friday Agreement

  17 The Elvis Years

  18 One Night of Shame

  19 The Ideal Home

  20 An Ending

  21 First Kiss

  22 The Apprentice

  23 Party with the Kray Twins

  24 Working Girl

  25 A Stunt

  26 What’s in the Box?

  27 A Ferry Ride

  28 A Plan

  29 She’s Leaving Home …

  Afterwards

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  3am: Saturday, 27 September 2008

  The bedside light clicks on. Wide awake. Again. Another broken night’s sleep. If I read for an hour or so, maybe slumber will return. Reaching out for the pile of unread newspapers by the bed, I pluck a colour supplement from the top of the pile and turn to the first page.

  And I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing.

  For my weary eye has been instantly drawn to a black-and-white photo in the middle of the page.

  It is a powerful image, used to illustrate a historical feature in the Financial Times weekend magazine: a throng of City gents at the London Stock Exchange reading the latest newspapers, a fly-on-the-wall reaction shot taken by a Daily Express photographer.

  And the news that day in 1938 was both dramatic and momentous. Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had returned from a brief visit to Munich to tell the world he’d reached an agreement with Hitler: we would not go to war with Germany.

  It was a misleading about-turn in history, an all-too-brief moment of hope, a bleak false dawn that would unravel within twelve months.

  Yet it is the pretty young woman at the very centre of the crowd, looking directly at the camera, who really makes the photo come to life. She’s smartly attired: a neat tailored suit, pendant around her neck, jaunty little black hat. And she’s smiling, a youthful smile that somehow embodies the brief optimism of the hour. Close by, a fresh-faced young man with round glasses and wavy hair looks startled, unsure of what’s happening. Somehow the photographer has managed to capture the emotional timbre of the times.

  I stare at the photo in total shock, because the youthful couple are my parents, Molly and Ginger, in their courting days, long before I arrived on the scene. I have many black-and-white photos of them after their marriage a few years later. And I will never know what they were doing at the Stock Exchange that historic night. But I had never seen my parents as they were then: so young, so vulnerable, unaware of the mayhem that lay ahead.

  What makes the image doubly poignant, however, is the contrast with the present. For the pretty young girl in the picture is now a very frail, confused ninety-two-year-old living in a care home, totally dependent on the support of others. I had visited her hours before, made her a cup of tea and smoothed scented cream onto her wrinkled hands. And although I can’t quite bring myself to acknowledge it right now, her life is slowly ebbing away.

  Although I’m excited at having discovered this amazing archive photo in such a random way – I might easily have left the supplement unopened, as happens sometimes with the weekend papers – I am somewhat perplexed at the timing. Why now? Always slightly superstitious, searching for hidden meaning, once I have contacted Getty Images, the photographic archive credited, and confirmed that I can buy my own copy of the photo, I start to wonder: are my parents trying to reach out to me in some way? My dad had died decades before. As for my mother, when I do show her the photo a few days later she does not react in any way. She can’t. Her memory is virtually gone, though thankfully she holds fast to her recognition of me. To her, it’s just a piece of paper. She feels no identifiable relationship with the pretty young girl with the bright smile.

  But what are they trying to say, waving at me from the distance of so many decades?

  Do they want me to remember their times, what they lived through, how it was for them after the photo was taken, when they and millions of others were plunged headlong into the chaos of World War II?

  Or are they merely trying to reassure me, let me know that somehow, they are watching me, looking out for me? This, of course, is a pleasant and comforting thought. But I do not hold any religious beliefs. Nor did my parents. I have long held a half-formed belief that there may be spiritual worlds out there that we don’t quite understand, can’t readily access. My mother too was acutely aware of such things. After my dad died she’d fallen seriously ill. ‘He was trying to take me with him,’ she told me afterwards.

  But when I rationalise it, ask myself for the umpteenth time why this photo should fall into my hands now, of course I can’t quite reach any coherent answer. The journalist in me is gratified to see my parents’ image captured at such a significant moment in London’s long history. That will have to do.

  Less than a year later, my mother is gone, swiftly and without fuss, after lunch on a summer’s day. It shouldn’t have been a shock, but it turns my world upside down. Our bonds have always been very close, drawn even closer since she became so frail and needy. So I don’t get round to collecting the framed Getty image until months afterwards.

  But finally, once it has been carefully hung on my bedroom wall, I start to understand what the image means for me: it’s up to me to tell their story, as I know it, not the history of their respective families or everything that happened to them during their lives, but the story of my childhood, growing up with them in London’s East End after peace had been declared; my own snapshot, if you like, of two decades that were so very different from the world we now live in.

  Naturally, I hesitate. It’s not exactly thrilling when you realise that your own life is history, you’ve been around so long that many of your references are unrecognisable, unknown to many. And it’s daunting too because mine was not a joyful childhood, though I’m conscious that I am not alone in this. Do I really want to go there? Should I reach out to exhume the bad moments, the tears, the confusion? They’re not exactly buried deep. So why rake over what is done? After all, I was fortunate; I never knew want or need. And while my relationship with my father
was wrecked by his relationship with alcohol and I grew to loathe our environment, my mother was as loving a parent as anyone could ever wish for. Moreover, my subsequent life as a globe-trotting journalist and writer has proved to be as exciting and varied as anyone might desire.

  But while I was born into a black-and-white world where people shivered and could only dream of an era of blue skies and well-stocked larders, I realise that there was colour too in the emerging post-war world. It might not have been instantly visible. But step by step, huge emerging social reforms were to transform lives in ways that would have been unimaginable at the time that photo was taken: free healthcare and education for all, the abolition of hanging, the arrival of the contraceptive pill, the reforms to divorce and abortion laws, the legalisation of homosexuality. Decades of making do – rationing didn’t finally end until 1954 – gave way to full employment, cheap foreign travel, consumer goods for all. It’s a story worth telling for more than personal reasons.

  OK, so it was a bizarre childhood in many ways, living in a bomb-scarred street in Hackney with a dad whose wallet was permanently stuffed with notes. But as a child then, you only knew one world, your own streets, the lives around you. You weren’t bombarded, 24/7 with incessant images of other, far more glamorous lives of luxury, endless partying and permanent sunshine, where only fame itself must be sought to achieve the perfect life. I never knew envy or aspiration simply because I didn’t see much that was different or distracting to envy. I took our upside-down world for granted: an abundance of food and black-market goodies; being driven around by a chauffeur in a Daimler, smartly turned out like a little princess with a glamorous mum.

  Any fear I might have known existed mainly in my imagination, though being an overprotected child created a curious mix of physical timidity with a somewhat verbose confidence. And whatever the shortcomings of my immediate world, I easily found my escape through the written word: stifling and claustrophobic as the backdrop of childhood was, writing was my key to a future as yet undreamed of.

  So this is my story of those years, of that lost world. Apprehensive when I sat down to start writing it, as the memoir grew I realised that a colleague, who’d already gone down a similar route, had been spot-on.

  ‘Better than therapy,’ he’d advised. ‘You realise when you go there that it wasn’t that bad, after all.’

  Technically, I’m not a baby boomer; I miss out by a matter of months. But I’ve always aligned myself with the good fortune of the post-war generation, the kids that grew up to reap the benefit of all those social changes: the full employment, the sexual revolution, the travel, the affluence of the eighties and beyond. When I think long and hard about it, we did, mostly, have it all. It might have started badly. And things may look uncertain right now, especially as the baby boomers are ‘getting on’ in years, not to mention feeling concern for the future of succeeding generations. But luck was on our side. Baby boomers are the historically privileged.

  Yet in our nostalgic view of the past, there’s a temptation to believe it was all so much safer, more innocent, a much kinder world then. It was, but only in some ways. Our relationships with each other were quite different. In many post-war families, relationships suffered badly, partly because of the consequences of war itself but also because people’s lives were stifled, held back by convention, lack of communication – and lack of economic freedom as far as many women were concerned. The bad moments, the personal tragedies, the human failings or weaknesses tended to be unacknowledged, hidden, rarely discussed openly. Authority itself was rarely questioned too. You just got on with it.

  Today we are so much richer in our awareness of what makes us and others tick. We can ask lots of questions. And we expect good answers. We take for granted the fact that we can, if we wish, engage in open discourse with others about virtually any topic under the sun. You can argue the toss about which way is better. And there are times when that open, frank exchange does go too far: too much information. But I’m firmly on the side of the present passion for disclosure. When it comes to emotional intelligence, we’ve come a long way from those bomb-scarred years.

  Finally, writing this memoir has made me understand something quite fundamental: my mum’s optimistic smile was not merely symbolic of the moment, or even her ‘live for now’ nature. That bright optimism was a beacon, a guide, not just for me but for everyone. The future, as always, will take care of itself. But what are we as individuals if we cannot look ahead and hope?

  Jacky Hyams

  London, January 2011

  CHAPTER 1

  THE VICAR’S BABY

  December 22, 1944

  Molly could just about manage to move her feet across the sheet until she came across what she’d been hoping for: a hot-water bottle. But the stone bed-warmer was cold now. They’d given her scratchy woollen socks to wear; yet her feet were still freezing. The nurse, the one who’d been quite nice to her until the unbearable pain really started to kick in, was nowhere to be seen. Somewhere in the background, Molly could hear the sounds of babies crying. And despite the big fire still burning in the grate at the far end of the enormous room with its tall windows and high ceilings – had it been a ballroom at some point in its history? she had wondered vaguely when she arrived – all Molly could think now was, ‘It’s so cold in here. How can they let us lie here freezing like this?’

  ‘Get your sister to bring you a blanket,’ came a voice from the next bed. Molly couldn’t remember the girl’s name, though they’d been quite chatty in the morning, just before Molly actually went into labour. ‘She can’t come … my mum’s really bad,’ was all Molly could manage; and only then, once she’d spoken the words, did it all start to sink in: the rushed farewell, hugging her frail and emaciated mum, Bella, back in the Leeds house they’d been evacuated to; the lonely taxi ride in the blackout along the narrow meandering road to the outskirts of Tadcaster until they finally reached the maternity home, a 700-year-old castle with ancient grey stone walls. The castle had been requisitioned by the Ministry of Health to be used as a safe haven for expectant mums when World War II broke out.

  Then the last twenty-four hours came rushing back: the increasingly scary labour pains that took over her whole being without warning, until there was nothing else in the world but Molly screaming and shouting, hearing nothing but ‘push, push, push, mum’ for what seemed like forever until, finally, the words she’d always secretly known she’d hear one day, ‘You’ve got a little girl, Mrs Hyams, a lovely little girl …’

  It was all over. She had her little girl! Ginger, of course, wanted a boy, someone to teach football and take to the pub. ‘I want us to call him Jack, after Dad,’ he’d written confidently from India in his last letter. ‘Well, it’ll have to be Jacqueline,’ thought Molly, struggling to ignore her frozen feet and the soreness and pain all over her body. ‘Thank God, there’ll be no going down the pub with Ginger and Jack.’

  All of a sudden, a flurry of activity on the ward. Three nurses march in across the vast expanse of wooden floor, holding the tightly wrapped newborns for their mothers. It had been busy here last night, three babies born within hours of each other. A starched, trim figure stops at Molly’s bed, a nurse she’s never seen before, holding the tiny, precious bundle aloft. ‘Here you are, Mrs Hyams. Come on, sit up and say hello to your baby,’ a voice says briskly.

  Slowly, Molly manages to ease herself up. The soreness is awful. But the desire to hold her longed for little girl close for the first time is more powerful. Reaching out, still shaky, she just about manages to get the tiny bundle into her arms. And the exhausted new mum looks down lovingly for the first time into the screwed up, tiny red face of the sleeping infant …

  ‘THAT’S NOT MY BABY!’ screams Molly.

  ‘YOU’VE GIVEN ME SOMEONE ELSE’S BABY!’

  At first, the nurse won’t have any of it. The new mums are not always easy. Hardly surprising with most of the men God knows where and the war still going on. But these w
omen are lucky to go through the ordeal of childbirth in a maternity ward with doctors around – other women have no choice: childbirth frequently happens at home, with help from a local midwife.

  ‘Mrs Hyams.’ she soothes. ‘This IS your baby.’

  But, just to reassure herself, she checks the tiny tag on the baby’s foot. Then, without another word, she snatches the tiny bundle from the distraught Molly’s arms, and rushes off with it down the length of the vast, chilly room.

  Minutes later, she is back at my mother’s bedside with the bundle, accompanied by the stern figure of Matron.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Hyams, it seems there was a bit of a mistake,’ explains Matron, dryly, not quite managing to conceal her anger at the mix-up. There will definitely be hell to pay behind the scenes later on.

  ‘Look, Mrs Hyams, here’s your little girl now …,’ she coos as a relieved, bewildered but nonetheless delighted Molly finally gets to see and cuddle me for the very first time.

  Later on, Molly found out what had really happened from the woman in the next bed. A new nurse had been taken on not long before I was born that day in late December. Somehow, in a fit of nerves or sheer panic, she’d mixed up the newborn baby tags. I had been labelled with the surname of the local vicar, and Baby Vicar, in turn, had been labelled ‘Hyams’. The vicar’s child was a boy, so the mistake would surely have been spotted even without my mother’s instinctive reaction. Had the vicar’s child been a girl, however, it’s quite possible that Molly would have innocently gone back to Leeds with the wrong baby.